


diamond rings and gutter bones

by Errantmushroom



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: College, F/M, Happy Halloween, Love, Making bad decisions with alcohol, Neighbors, No Magic AU, a little angsty, highschool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-15 23:43:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21261563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Errantmushroom/pseuds/Errantmushroom
Summary: “Did you have to scare off my date?” He pouts, because of course he does, and it is obscene, the way it makes her want his lips on her neck.“Some date,” Mallory says. “She all but called you Humbert Humbert.”Michael’s mouth quirks. “Yes, we’ll have to work on her insults, I suppose.”“Are you guys - are you - ” Madison lets loose a strangled sound of disgust. “Flirting?”





	diamond rings and gutter bones

Mallory sees him on a crowded dance floor, sticking out like a sore thumb because the fucker is _ tall, _ and her heart literally (_literally _ literally, she’s sure of it) does a belly flop right into her stomach, where it dissolves in the acid there like it should have years ago.

Madison must see him too because she digs her elbow into Mallory’s ribs and her painted pink nails into Mallory’s upper arm. Madison’s mouth does a little ‘o’ like she just saw someone run over a ratty little squirrel with their brand new beemer, the one with the pearl paint job and the shiny chrome rims, and she’s not sure if she feels worse for the car or for the animal. In this scenario, Mallory is very much the squirrel. She can tell by the glimmer in Madison’s eyes alone that Michael - tall, blonde, fabulous Michael - is the human equivalent of an expensive car to Madison.

“Oh my god, is that him?” She yells rather than says right into Mallory’s ear because it’s too damn loud in this place to _ think _ straight, let alone hear what a person standing right next to you is saying.

Mallory knows that it’s him with her body rather than her gaze because she can already feel the gravity of him pulling her into his orbit, her very own binary star with his golden halo and shining blue eyes.

Up until this very moment, Mallory had convinced herself that he had, perhaps, moved away. Or died, whichever was more convenient for her at the moment.

One day the two of them were the same as they had always been - trading old books and biting quips, touching but never _ touching _, him with the haunted look in his eyes and her wearing a veil of macrame daylight. The next day he was just gone, as though he’d never been at all. Of course, that was silly, people like Michael Langdon didn’t just cease to exist. He was an enigma, a black hole, larger than any mythos and twice as unreal. He was everywhere and nowhere, tangible but untouchable all at the same time.

And maybe that’s why she had kissed him, just once, before he had disappeared from her life for good. Maybe she had always known that he would leave her, in the end.

—

One day, when Mallory was still in high school, and chemistry class meant desks scraping linoleum and unused glass phials and the faint smell of sweat from the gymnasium down the hall, her teacher had asked her if she could stay after class.

The woman had her light brown hair in a high bun and picked at the buttons on her polka dot dress. She looked, Mallory imagined, like a very boring future version of herself.

Her chemistry teacher, whose name time had gently erased as the letters chalk on a blackboard, had asked her if she could, please, consider tutoring one Michael Langdon. 

Mallory had stood there, uncertainty playing across her face. The teacher could see it, and launched into her prescripted speech. Didn’t they live near one another? Hadn’t they rode the bus together once or twice? Certainly they’d seen each other in their neighborhood?

“Mallory, he’s struggling, and you are making the highest marks in this class.”

Mallory swallowed, her throat gone dry and tight. She knew the rumors about Michael, she had heard the whispers.

They said that he was the devil made flesh, a demon in boy skin. 

Her teacher sighed and lifted her wire-rim glasses. She rubbed away at the little red marks on the sides of her nose. “You’re kind and patient. You’re a good tutor. I wouldn’t ask but…” she placed her glasses back on their perch. “You always do so well with them. And he needs this. Please.”

Mallory never could say no to a pet project.

And Mallory quickly became happiest on the days that she was supposed to go over and tutor Michael. He was smart, witty, and challenged her in ways that she had not expected. He thrilled to listen to her speak of the stars, of John Keats, of infinity and its microcosms. He tolerated her talk of chemistry, just barely, but she could work around that.

She was practically jumping in her skin as she rang the doorbell for another one of their sessions, but it was Constance, his grandmother, not Michael who answered.

Constance was drawing smoke from a long, jade-studded silver cigarette holder. She always seemed to be smoking, which is perhaps where Michael got it from. But when Constance blew a column of smoke into her face, Mallory found herself annoyed, rather than teased as she was when Michael did it. The taste of ash clung to her tongue and she held back a cough that itched to leave her throat.

“You’re here again?” Constance drawled, her accent slow and thick as maple syrup.

“Well, yes, exams haven’t happened yet so…”

Constance leaned against the doorframe, blocking Mallory’s way into the house. There was a smile on her face, reptilian in the way that Constance’s expressions often were, and she let her eyes drift up and down Mallory’s body. Her gaze seemed to tear Mallory right to the bone, and that, Mallory knew, was definitely something Michael had gotten from her. “You seem to be a good, puritan girl. Here’s a little advice from a godly woman who has been around the world and then some.” She said. “That boy... that boy is an abomination.”

Mallory’s face fell. “Oh, Mrs. Langdon, I - ”

“His marks are not improving, so I know it’s not his studies you’re working on up there, giggling at all hours of the day. Do _ not _ lie to me, girl.” Constance said, pointing a finger in Mallory’s face as soon as she saw the girl’s mouth drop open. “I see the way you look at him, the shameful, dirty sin in your eyes. He is a beautiful boy. But let me tell you, he is gayer than Christmas morning, he’s got no interest in you. Better that he did, because he’ll burn in hell for those black thoughts in his head.”

“I’m just his tutor.” Mallory protested weakly.

Constance’s eyes narrowed to slits. “He’s an abomination.” She drew in a shaking breath, swirling her hands in the air as though she were about to rain hellfire down on her home herself. “Born of rape and murder and _ rot _. He’s been killing since before he was born. In the womb, he consumed his own brother, his own brother! He snatched his mother’s life as he left her body. His father would rather die than touch him. And here he tortures his own poor, loving grandmother until there’s nothing left inside of her but sorrow.” Her fingers fluttered to her chest and laid there, still. “There’s not one damned redeeming quality about him, he breaks everything he touches. I’m telling you for your own good, little girl, run. And don’t come back.”

Constance had then promptly slammed the door in Mallory’s face, but just before she did, Mallory caught sight of Michael’s face above his grandmother’s shoulder as he stood on the stairs, pinned as he was like a monarch butterfly under the glass of her venom. His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears.

Mallory remembers herself then, a girl in her girlhood, and how her cheeks were stained red at the suggestion that anything so crude as _ sex _ was going on between her and Michael, but also with the rage in her heart. How the pain of her anger had burned a hole in her lungs. She had stood on those steps at the front door of Constance Langdon’s home for what felt like hours, until her legs ached and her heels went numb, and her fingers curled in on themselves and made holes in her palms.

Finally, she had gone home, and her parents didn’t ask where she had been. Michael never spoke to her about what had occurred that day and she did not dare bring it up herself.

  
—

Mallory’s eyes follow him when he strides from the dance floor straight to the balcony. She wonders if he still smokes, but thinks, of course he does. Madison sees him leave too and she grins like an imp and pulls at Mallory, pleading with her hands to let her lead Mallory outside. Madison wants to see him up close, the boy who broke Mallory into a million pieces. Mallory is just self-deprecating enough to allow Madison this indignity on her person, she doesn’t even care if seeing him rips open all her old, carefully sewn up scars, so long as she could chance to pore over the ghost of him just once more.

Coco hooks her arm into the crook of Mallory’s elbow as they walk. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Her eyebrows are knit and her mouth puckered like she’s swallowed a wedge of lemon, the yellow rind scraped raw against her teeth. “You don’t have to do this, Mal. We can just leave.” Coco had been her friend longer than Madison. She’d seen first hand the mushroom cloud fallout of Michael’s abrupt departure, the weeks of crying followed by fury, and then numbness, just nothing at all.

Mallory draws a breath, steadies herself. “I’m okay.” She’s lying, but she doesn’t know that yet. “I’ve got this.” She offers Coco a sterling smile that she doesn’t feel.

The balcony is perched precariously at the end of the brick building. There is only a skinny wrought iron fence keeping the drunk club-goers from toppling down two stories and breaking something important. It’s packed too, but not nearly as loud, as the conversations and music disperse into the cold night air. Michael is leaning against the fence like he’s begging it to collapse under his weight.

He’s dressed as the devil, with two little red horns settled in his golden hair, and his bright blue eyes are accented with shadow the color of dried blood. His mouth is sinful, even now, even with a woman curled around him, and looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else than here. 

He is swaying gently with a sweating glass in his hands, so at odds with the image of him in her head. She’s only seen him drink once before.

  
—

They had broken into Constance’s liquor cabinet while she was out at the salon. His hair was much shorter then, burnished gold curled around his ears. They were teenagers, and they acted like it, thrilled to be breaking the rules. Michael had the key to the cabinet in his hands, small and glinting gold in the afternoon light that had come to peer at them through the curtains on the big bay windows. He smiled like a secret then, and pushed the key into the lock until it clicked. He reached into the little cherry wood cabinet and pulled back a small bottle of bourbon with a cap like melted scarlet wax, the liquor licking at the sides of the bottle, slow as honey and just as pretty.

They had sipped liquor while the sun sunk into the grass, melted gold bleeding into a haze of pinks and purples, dandelions and delphinium. They drank straight from the bottle, and Mallory had determinedly ignored the fact that her lips touched the glass in the same places that his had. She tried not to think of him, not like that anyway. They were Just Friends. They could be Just Friends, after all, he was very charismatic, but you could not be more than Just Friends with a boy who regularly killed small animals and then deposited them on your back doorstep. 

The first time her mother had found a rabbit, each white paw painstakingly removed from its respective leg, the black blood soaked into the cement, she had screamed and screamed. She accused Mallory of playing a cruel trick on her, no nevermind that Mallory had not so much as laid a hand on a bug since the day she was born. Mallory made Michael swear not to hurt another animal, but Michael never was very good at keeping promises. 

And so they were Just Friends. He taught her how to hand roll cigarettes, tobacco sealed tightly within the paper, and she taught him Avogadro’s number, and how to calculate the molar mass of a single grain of salt as it appeared on her fingertip. If her eyes lingered just a little too long on the dart of his pink tongue against the paper, then his lips, well, she could always chalk it up to being a good student.

That day they had gotten so drunk that they couldn’t tell the difference between the pinpoint stars in the blue-velvet sky and the ones behind their eyes. Michael was sick all over the patio floor and he swore, delirious between heaves, that he would die before he let himself have another drink.

  
—

But here he is, sipping something that looks suspiciously like whiskey in a swirling red coat, most assuredly still amongst the living. Mallory’s friends surround him and all at once she realizes her mistake. Seeing them with him makes them look less like her coven, and more like his horsemen of the apocalypse. 

“Hi, Michael.” She makes herself smile behind her painted red lips “It’s been a while.” She convinces herself that he can’t hurt her, not here, not years after the first time he’d carved her like a fish, not with her heart beating calmly in its iron cage.

Michael peers down his long nose at her. He breathes in a drag of his cigarette and lets the smoke coil into the air from his nostrils. He looks every inch of the demon he’s dressed up to be. “And you are?”

She blinks and goes very still. Oh, but she has misplayed her hand, shown it too soon and with too much gusto. It must show on her face because the woman at his side peaks a vicious laugh and it stings like there are nettles in her lungs.

Mallory’s cheeks grow warm and suddenly she sees herself from the outside looking in, a small nothing of a girl with makeup done in a shaking, inexperienced hand, wearing clothes that show too much skin in all the wrong places. She had curled her hair so carefully before she left her little apartment, but now it is frizzy and sticking to her face with beads of sweat. She is only an actor playing a part, and playing it poorly to boot.

“Is this your little Lolita, Michael?” The woman croons.

Mallory cringes at the connotation. She looks younger than her years, she knows that, but she is only two years younger than Michael. This hardly qualifies her as a child, and if she is, she is only so much as Michael.

The liquor from her shots done earlier, salty tequila and lime, coils inside her belly and spits menace inside of her, fire licking at the bone of her ribs. “Does that make you Charlotte?” She asks, feigning innocent as a cherry pie and twice as tooth-achingly sweet.

The woman’s smile fades, just a bit, and then her lip curls. “I’ll be inside,” she says. “You can stay here and play babysitter.” She extricates herself from Michael, pulling her hands from his coat pockets and unraveling her arms from where they had been twined around his waist. She stomps away and Mallory tries to suffocate the small part of herself that is pleased when Michael doesn’t look too affected by the loss.

Michael rolls his eyes and drops his cigarette to the ground (are they still made by hand, carefully rolled between his thumb and his index finger?) where he grinds on it with his pointed calf skin boots until the embers choke and die. “Did you have to scare off my date?” He pouts, because of course he does, and it is obscene, the way it makes her want his lips on her neck.

“Some date,” Mallory says. “She all but called you Humbert Humbert.”

Michael’s mouth quirks. “Yes, we’ll have to work on her insults, I suppose.”

“Are you guys - are you - ” Madison lets loose a strangled sound of disgust. “_Flirting_?”

Coco pats Madison’s shoulder sympathetically as Mallory whips her head towards the two of them. “No, what the hell, Madison?” She says at the same time as Coco lowers her voice and says in Madison’s ear. “Yes, definitely.”

“I’d sooner eat my right shoe.” Michael says.

Madison puts one hand on her hip and fixes him with a glare. “I’d say you better get chewing then, lover boy.”

Michael narrows his eyes at Mallory. “This one is new,” he says with his head tilted to Madison. “I don’t like her.”

“Oh my god, who asked you?” Madison says. “Come on, Mallory, this guy sucks.”

“He sucks because he doesn’t want to fuck you?” Coco titters.

“Who said he doesn’t? I don’t want to fuck _ him_.” Madison pulls Mallory by the waist and Mallory lets herself be dragged along, once again. She doesn’t know why she allows it, but then she does, if only to see if Michael will chase her. He doesn’t, he never has and he will not start today, not now, not in this place.

Mallory decides that she will not leave first. She paid twenty whole dollars to get into this club tonight and she’s not rolling in cash the way Michael is. If he doesn’t want to see her, fine, he can leave. She, on the other hand, has plans to get roaringly, ridiculously, out-of-her-mind drunk.

She makes her way to the bar and puts her hands against the marble. Her hands are sticky when she pulls them away, but the drink in her hands makes it worth the trouble. The vodka in it burns all the way down to her stomach. The grapefruit turns her tongue so sour that she cannot feel her mouth. She decides she likes it better that way.

She gets so drunk that the world turns into a blur. The people around her are nothing but shadows, just dream-people against halos of soft blue and purple lights. The music is in her now, maybe she is made of music, she thinks and it makes her laugh. She laughs like bells and knows she is made of music certainly.

She turns and turns and turns, a dancer in her little music box.

  
—

Cordelia adopted Mallory at the behest of Mallory’s parents. They could barely afford to feed themselves and their youngest children, let alone Mallory. They were too proud to beg for money, but not proud enough to refrain from asking their cousin to take away their first born and least favorite.

Mallory, in her threadbare dresses with her naked feet, who insisted on dancing in the garden and feeding the stray cats, who spoke in whispers to the stars under the new moon.

Cordelia’s sprawling estate was an oasis, Mallory’s very own eden. Her parents had never loved her, but she knew that Cordelia Goode did without ever feeling the need to ask.

Cordelia had liked Michael well enough at first, everyone did. How could they not? He was undeniable. His face was cherubic, big blue eyes framed with long lashes, and yellow curls against his cheekbones. He could play innocent like an Oscar winner. But slowly, her feelings about him began to change, like rot on the skin of a piece of fruit.

Once they got into college, Michael graduated from torturing animals to hurting people.

He’d stay out late, but never with Mallory (she would ask him, every time, to come with her to her favorite clubs and bars. The answer was always no), and he’d come by the next day with bruises blooming plum and gold into his brow or across his jaw. His fists would be red, if he was lucky, or split open and oozing dried black blood if he was not. Once he had a cracked rib, another time it was his wrist, and then there was the time he had gotten swiped at by a pocket knife.

She imagines he still has the scars from that one, long and silvery up his arms, jagged from his refusal to accept stitches.

Mallory thought, she still thinks, that Michael is trying to burn the world down to ashes and himself along with it, and he doesn’t particularly care which one will be the first to go.

Cordelia thought that Michael tainted Mallory, that much Mallory was aware of. She had caught them more than once in the library, limbs tangled against one another, or Mallory’s legs stretched across Michael’s lap while they each had their respective nose in a book, the touch-starved and their desperations. Michael read Dante’s Inferno, Mallory read Wuthering Heights (if she imagined that she had her own Heathcliff, she would not say).

Michael had his long fingers laced in hers. He rubbed the pad of his thumb across her knuckles, and she looked up at him, surprised by the electricity that skittered down her spine in response to his touch. He had an odd look in his eyes, his mouth set in a solemn line. “Some days, I wish it was only us, just the two of us, in the entire world.” He said.

She smiled at him then. “I’d give you two days before I bored you to tears.”

“Absolutely not, you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

“Okay then, three days, at the very most.”

“Mallory.”

“_Michael_.”

She was looking at his lips and he was looking at her, just her, when Cordelia rounded the corner with an ‘ahem’ in the back of her throat. They had jumped apart as though scalded, despite not doing anything wrong. Despite the fact that this was how they so often were. But Cordelia made it feel like a dirty thing, like it was a sin.

Cordelia had pulled her aside later, after Michael had left, and asked if they were an item. Mallory knew then that Cordelia had probably listened to them too, and she wondered how often Cordelia shadowed herself against the wall behind the corner and pressed her ear to their most private conversations.

They were not together _ like that_, only very close friends, Mallory had insisted, but Cordelia looked as though she did not believe her. Her conversations with Mallory about Michael, about how he would do her no good, how he would hurt her, how he was dangerous, only became more and more frequent.

  
—

Michael sees her on the dance floor. She is a fresco in a mass of writhing bodies. She is an angel with plastic wings frayed at the edges. Her buttoned white lace top has fallen open, revealing the column of her throat, and a petal of skin above her breast. Somehow that is more erotic than the gentle curve of her waist that has been bare all night.

Her rhythm is chaotic, an alcohol-induced delirium, and she is smiling. The devil inside him cries that this smile is not shone onto him, that it is not _ for _ him. He clenches a fist around his jacket lapel, crushing it into his palm, and he knows he will not be strong enough to leave her alone tonight. He mourns his weak will, his blackest thoughts.

He waits until her friends go to the bar or the bathroom, it doesn’t matter so long as they are not there to interfere, and he takes a step towards her.

  
—

Mallory feels a pressure at her waist and twists, too fast, barreling into chest of the man who had grabbed her. She tries to back away and stumbles, and he places his hands on her shoulders to steady her. 

She meets his eyes, and it is Michael, and she almost thinks she is hallucinating except for the warmth of his fingers through the lace of her shirt.

She smiles, then promptly throws up all over his shoes.

  
—

“Mallory, do you believe in redemption?”

Mallory blinked at Michael, his question had come out of thin air. He had only been sitting on the stone bench in the garden and watching her tend to her snowdrops, her anemones, her chrysanthemums. She hummed to herself as she considered him. “I think,” she said carefully. “That there is nothing we can do in our short, mortal lives that cannot be forgiven.”

“And how might forgiveness be attained?” He looked nervous, running his hands through his too-long hair and tapping one foot against the cement. “Through pain? Through suffering and blood? Do all your sins need to be cleansed through fire?”

Mallory frowned and set her watering can down in the soil. She let her fingers brush against the velvety petals as she walked towards Michael, promising them with her touch that she would be back to tend to them soon.

Michael refused to meet her gaze and so she knelt there, angled nearly between his long legs, and placed her palms against his face. His blue eyes were glassy, and it made her ache like there were thorns there in her chest, pressed up against the bloom of her heart. “Not everything has to hurt.” She promised. “Sometimes, if you want to be forgiven, all you have to do is ask.” 

He looked at her then and his mouth opened just a little, and before he could say anything at all, she arched herself to meet him. She kissed him there in the garden, between the flowers, until their breathing was ragged and their lips were swollen and red. He’d pulled her into his lap and had his fingers tangled in her hair and she could feel him hard against her hip. He groaned into her mouth, and then seemed to remember himself all at once.

Michael stilled and grabbed her around the waist. He lifted her up and set her onto the bench carefully, so carefully, and then he stood up. His face looked as though he was in physical pain. “I’m so sorry.” He said. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to do that.”

Mallory steadied herself, her hands on the stone bench the only things keeping her anchored to the earth. Her head felt like it was swimming, full of stars, like she was dreaming. She wanted to say, it’s okay. She wanted to say, do it again. But no words came out and Michael backed away from her, stepped again and again until he was a shadow on the horizon and by the time she stood up to chase him, he was already gone.

The flowers never did finish getting watered that day.

  
—

“I’m not going with you, you’re drunk.” She accuses.

Mallory had, naturally, been kicked out of the club for being unable to hold her liquor, and then being sick all over the dance floor. Coco and Madison hadn’t wanted to leave and so Michael offered to drive her home.

She was sure she’d rather have a stained, odorous taxi than endure a whole drive anywhere with him.

Michael rolls his eyes. “It’s iced tea. Here, taste.” He offers her his drink and she obliges. It doesn’t taste like alcohol, but nothing does right now, not even her own drink which most definitely contains a healthy splash of vodka.

She peers at him suspiciously. “Are you going to kill me?” She thinks back to his animals, the ones he used to dismember and leave in her backyard. She wonders if he will do the same to her, pull her arms and legs from her torso and leave her in front of some other poor girl’s home.

He laughs then, and she thinks it is a shame, how much that sound makes her feel like home. “No, you’re much too pretty to kill, I think.”

Mallory swallows down the way her heart flutters in her chest and tries to remember that this is Michael. Michael who she hasn’t seen in three years, Michael who ghosted her the day after she kissed him, Michael who is probably just on the hunt for easy prey. Mallory has always been easy prey for Michael. This is what bored him before, she is sure of it.

Still, she does not want to fight him. So she shrugs. “If you do kill me, I’ll haunt you until have to like, kill yourself to get rid of me.” She hops into his shiny black car and slams the passenger door in his face so that he does not see her smile, how pleased she is to just be with him again.

He starts the car and she swears she falls asleep before his foot hits the gas pedal, lulled unconscious by alcohol thrumming through her bloodstream and Debussy spilling low from the speakers.

She dreams of nothing at all.

  
—

Mallory wakes with a start. She knows she’s not home by the thick aroma of smoke and bergamot and pine, the smell of Michael.

His arms, warm as sin, are wrapped around her waist and he is pressed hard into her back and she can feel his breath whispering against her ear. She wonders if she has died, because that is the only way this can be real.

And then, she remembers, she was supposed to go home. The only reason he hadn’t taken her home was because she had passed out.

There is a hole in her chest where her heart used to be. She knows she needs to leave.

Mallory makes to get out of the bed. She folds in on herself, tries to become just a shadow, but as soon as one foot hits the ground, Michael has his hand around her wrist like iron. He shackles her to him and pulls her back, forcing her by her shoulders into the down of the blankets. They puff up around her like clouds.

Her heart is doing somersaults in her chest and she is hot all over, melting like wax. When she doesn’t try to get away, his grip relaxes, as though he was only terrified that she would try to leave him again. Hadn’t anyone told him that he was the one who left her?

She lifts her hand to his face and traces constellations with the pad of her index finger on his cheekbones, along the bridge of his nose. “Why did you leave me, Michael?” She says it likes she is praying for forgiveness, for redemption.

He swipes her palm and presses his mouth to it. “I never did.” He swears, his voice a rasp against her skin.

“I can’t forgive you.” 

“I know.” And his eyes slide shut and he presses his mouth to her collarbone, as though this, though it cannot make her forgive, can certainly make her forget.

Her hands tangle in his hair and she remembers when he would beg her to cut it. She never wanted to, but her fingers craved the feeling of his silken hair beneath her palm, and so she would eventually acquiesce. Her fingers would linger just a fraction of a second too long on his yellow curls, as she snip-snip-snipped with her mother’s pair of dull scissors under the cover of morning light that filtered in through the small stained glass window in her kitchen, until the linoleum floor was littered in a gold mosaic.

He kisses her until she is swimming in a sea of stars, until she knows nothing but the taste of mint on his lips.

“Cordelia wanted to make you her heir.” Michael says finally. “She said she would not do it while I was in your life. I did it for you, you see.” He curls his fingers against her hips and breathes in the smell of honey at the nape of her neck. “It’s all for you, it’s always been you.”

Cordelia, of course, and Mallory’s chest aches with the pain of yet another betrayal.

“But you never asked what I wanted, Michael.”

Michael pauses, long and quiet. “What do you want, Mallory?”

She kisses him, sweetly, softly, and presses her body to his so that there is no space between them anymore.

  
—

“You’re the only thing I’ve ever loved more than myself.” He says it like she is his confessional, like stained glass veneration, like he is dying in her arms.

  
—

The next day, after she has gone home to brush her teeth and change her clothes, Mallory does not wait for him to come to her.

She climbs into her black SUV and turns the radio to a tinny pop song, anything she can ignore, anything that will chase the white-noise-static from her brain.

Her hands tremble on the steering wheel and she throws the car into reverse. Her foot has just barely grazed grazed the pedal, she’s only just inched backwards, and there is a pounding on the back window. Mallory jumps out of her skin, gasping for air, had she hit something? She parks her car and bursts from the driver’s side door, and there is Michael.

His hair hangs in his eyes and he’s huffing, indignant. “You almost _ hit _ me, Mallory.” He says. “And after I came all this way - ”

And Mallory can’t help it, she can’t. It feels like there is a sun in her chest, the rays of light bursting through her ribs. She dashes into his arms and holds on. “Don’t leave me again, don’t go.” Never let go.

One hand is pressed against her back, the other curled against the nape of her neck. “I won’t.” I won’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!
> 
> The title comes from the song Mary by Big Thief. It sounds very Millory to me.
> 
> I wrote this after watching season 9 and feeling more sorry for Michael than anything. He struck me as an abused child who had never felt real love and was constantly searching for validation. It made me sad. I loved Mallory as a foil to him.
> 
> Admittedly, I was anticipating for AHS to gear up to an antichrist vs. the 2nd coming of Christ in the form of Mallory. Or even antichrist vs. angel!Mallory, given that we have seen angels before in AHS. Alas, it was not to be.
> 
> And of course the ending was a bit disappointing to me as I’m a sucker for a good redemption ark (Good Omens did it better). But I digress.
> 
> This came about from me wondering what would have happened if there was one person, just one, who accepted and cared for Michael as a person, instead of as a vessel. Then I wondered what would happen if that person was Mallory. And so this came about.
> 
> Comments/criticisms welcome!


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